The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Not just her,” as though it was an accusation. “All the hunters. All of us who become hunters get shown it. It’s the way, but . . .”

  “The Lawgiver can’t know.”

  “It’s not ghost business,” Erma said sullenly. “Right from the start, the ghosts say, keep away from the brackers. They have their places and we have ours. Only . . .”

  A tradition. What she had was what we have built these last ten years. A new way of doing things, a mystery, an Order. I couldn’t imagine what hard times or chance meeting led to what she’s describing, but I understood how it had been perpetuated, passed down one hunter to the next. Knowledge learned and taught, not simply distributed by a ghost. I could curse, that we only discovered this now, when the brackers had gone mad and destroyed a village, when this mystery of Erma’s was of no use to anyone.

  I wondered what Sharskin would have made of it. Even after all this time my thoughts still went to him. Would he have welcomed this sign that people had made something of their own, without the ghosts? Or would he have crushed it, because it was not his?

  After that, we made to leave Portruno to the scavengers. Perhaps people would travel here to recover anything left unbroken. Crafted things were valuable, after all, though there was little that had not been . . .

  I wanted to say smashed. I wanted to cast what I was seeing as mindless devastation: the beasts had run mad, as it is easy to imagine beasts doing. But the more I looked at the ruin, the more I saw fragments of pattern.

  Melory had seen it, too. She was standing by a flattened house, looking at objects strewn next to where its entrance would have been. Except they were not strewn. The word was arranged. There was a hoe, a rake, a knife, an arm. The hand was attached, but the fingers had been pulled off and set beside the knife, longest first. The whole sequence was in order of length. It was not an animal thing to do. It had a dreadful sense of a child’s game played with grisly pieces.

  Seeing that, we saw odd elements everywhere we looked. A circle of disjointed limbs, arranged so that the large ends all met in the centre; a house where the curved staves of the walls had been stacked neatly one atop another; a clutch of tree branches snapped off that had been leant together as though to form a model of the uprooted original. There was something chilling in it all, past mere death and ruin.

  I’d been a wanderer ten years. I had travelled from village to village, creating the traditions that kept the Order alive. The forest was my place. But now I looked into the trees and shivered.

  At our call, Erma turned from the tracks and led us back towards Tsuno. In all our minds, no doubt, was the fear that we would find another ruin, another toppled tree, all my followers vanished or torn apart trying to defend the place. We were strong against beasts, we of the Order. Animals were as frightened of us as people. Except these brackers were not acting like animals, and so our greatest weapon might mean nothing.

  We came back to Tsuno to find it still there; no bracker had come near it yet. However there was news. Some of Erma’s hunters had gone to spy on the new village the brackers were building for themselves on Tsuno land. They reported that the brackers had a human prisoner amongst them. More, they said it was no villager; it was one of ours.

  V

  THERE WAS A LOT of talking late into the night, and it went nowhere. The Lawgiver, that frightened boy, he spoke, and his ghost spoke, and neither of them had anything useful to say. Amorket is living proof that villages and their ghosts are not good at reacting to new things.

  Melory stood before the tree at Tsuno and sent word to the House of our Ancestors. The invisible voices there would remember what she had said and speak it back to Ostel and the others. There would be no help from so far away, though. And if the ghosts couldn’t help, then likely the ancestors couldn’t help, either.

  I spoke to my people of what we saw at Portruno, and that the brackers might not be driven off like beasts are. As for the supposed prisoner, none of us was missing, and Graf didn’t think any other band of the Order would be travelling near here. The brackers had some poor Severed outcast from Portruno, perhaps.

  Erma came to our camp to say she would go to the bracker village. She would try the traditions of her mystery. “It’s all we have,” she said. There was no hunter ghost to guide her, but if there was, it would be in the same position as the rest. The brackers had lived as careful neighbours of the people here for as long as anyone knew; Erma’s mystery was old when her Great-Grandma took her Grandma out into the woods, showed her the carving and blew the soundless whistle.

  They wanted us to go and fight, in the morning. Because the ghosts had no words and they were all frightened, they wanted to hide behind their part-built wall and have us go and drive the brackers away. For our part, the Order had to do something. This was what we were for, the greatest service we gave to the villages. In return for this, they overlooked our nature, they let us have their unwanted and did not hunt us. Their hate for us became just the fear of children. The Bandage-Men will get you. They knew that if both sides respected the traditions, they would be safe. But part of those traditions was that, when people and animals cannot live together, the Bandage-Men fight for the people against the world.

  I did not see this going well and so I talked to Erma about how she might use her mystery, and how we could help her. The whole night was one kind of talk or another. Of those who had come to the aid of Tsuno, only one wasn’t talking.

  In the morning, Amorket had already gone.

  For just a moment I thought she might simply have gone back towards Jalaino, or even wandered off into the woods to die. Melory knew better. Amorket was the doctor ghost’s patient and, just as she could track me all those years ago, she knew exactly where Amorket was headed. Towards the new village the brackers were building. She had gone to fight for Tsuno, alone.

  For me, I said let her go, but Melory and Erma both insisted we follow her. Erma feared Amorket would rile up the brackers even more and make the work of her mystery that much harder. Melory . . . At first I thought it was just the duty of the doctor to a patient, but on the way she told me, “Amorket is not the problem, Handry. Jalaino is the problem. Other villages might go the same way. That is what we need to solve. And Amorket is my only tool, to understand them.”

  * * *

  Erma, Melory and I, with half my people, followed the clear set of tracks Amorket had left. We heard her before we saw her: a thin, high human voice raised in angry challenge. We didn’t hear the bracker. When we burst from the trees and saw it, I felt very much like turning around and just going away again. I’d imagined something like a harboon, only bigger.

  Like most animals, it had six legs. The first set were largest, elbows higher than its body, feet like the knotted heads of clubs. I could imagine them smashing down a house very easily. Its hide was greyish and warty, thick and ridged about those front legs. Its back legs were short and stumpy; if nothing else, I reckoned I could outrun it easily enough. The middle legs were arms, slender and folded under its broad, flat body. I saw three thick pads on them like fat fingers.

  Its head was small for its body. Four eyes jutted on thumb-like jointed stalks, one either side, two below. Unlike most animals it couldn’t see straight up, and I was already thinking about treetop ambushes, dropped rocks. In front of the eyes there was a clutch of mouthparts like a webbed hand with six long fingers. Behind them were round discs of smooth skin, big ones and small ones.

  It had been painted. There were designs on the armour of its forelegs, and on its back, where it couldn’t even see. They were symmetrical, flowing, reminding me of the shape of certain plants, how they branch and put out leaves. Some of the markings had worn away, which is how I knew it was paint and not just pattern.

  The edges of its body were horny and jagged, and holes had been drilled there for ropes. On the ropes swung a clattering collection of . . . rubbish, I thought. Stones, pieces of wood, different colours and kinds. They served no purpose I could
see, save to make noise and weigh the thing down. Although, at half the size of a house, it wouldn’t be slowed much.

  Amorket was standing right before it, surely within smashing range of those club-like arms. Her wasps were all out, whirling about her in a frenzy, and when they widened their circle, the bracker’s head retracted halfway under the shield of its body, flinching. Amorket was shouting at it, telling it to go away, telling it to fight her. The bracker flared its mouthparts back at her, and I saw the circles of skin behind its eyes fuzz in and out. At the edge of my hearing something was tweaking my ears, like some of the sounds the House of our Ancestors made sometimes. Then the animal reared up and stomped its forelegs into the ground, hard enough that I felt the shake of it, and from deep within its body came a single sound, Brack!

  I thought it was about to turn Amorket into paste, wasps or no wasps, but then it backed off from her, attention turning to us. Erma had a pipe out and was blowing into it, no more than a wheeze of empty air, but the bracker marked her.

  Melory darted forwards and pulled at Amorket’s arm. The Jalaino woman stood stubbornly for a moment, wasps landing on her and taking off again, blundering at Melory’s face and veering away at the last moment.

  “What were you thinking?” my sister demanded, but I knew what Amorket intended. Many an outcast ends up Severed because sometimes a fight is simpler. A fight meant she wouldn’t have to deal with me. A fight would help Tsuno, or would end things for Amorket. I reckoned she wouldn’t much care which.

  The bracker knuckled closer, Amorket forgotten. Its eyes kept turning to me and mine, and it made several mock approaches, shying away each time in a way I knew from animals the world over. Wrong, and yet its eyes kept twitching my way, and normally once an animal has decided it doesn’t like me, it wastes no time in putting space between us.

  Erma was watching it very carefully, reading some truth from it by long experience. She started pulling things from her bag: a sealed gourd, a comb, rope. I saw some of the cords hanging from the edge of the bracker’s body looked human-made.

  Again that faintest of witterings ghosted from the bracker. Its middle legs unfolded and it picked up each object in turn, rejecting most of them, keeping the rope, testing the texture between its thick fingers. It gave another abortive lunge in my direction, but I and my people stood firm. The digits of its mouth flexed and fidgeted anxiously.

  “Scared of you,” Erma said quietly. “Doesn’t like you one bit.”

  “Enough to clear out and take its people somewhere else?” I asked her.

  “Never seen them like this.” Her brow was set in deep lines of thought. “Scared, but . . . it wants something from you, maybe. Like when they’re waiting at the posts before we whistle, because they’re after a thing we can give them.”

  Brack! And then it started creeping backwards, one limb at a time, all eyes on us.

  It stopped. We stared. It started retreating again, body angled low. It stopped, watching us.

  “Follow,” Erma said, but really she didn’t need to explain it.

  * * *

  “We’re just going with it, are we?” Kalloi wanted to know, but Erma certainly was, and she didn’t seem to care if we went or not. And the bracker, for its part, was warily focused on me and mine. And so we followed it in fits and starts to the bracker village.

  Our arrival was heralded by more of those explosive Brack! noises. I saw Amorket twitching, the ghostlight dancing about her face in a weird jitter. There were a lot of them.

  That was almost the whole of my first impression. Abruptly there were brackers everywhere between the trees ahead of us, dozens, a hundred, just more and more of them as far as I could see. More than we could ever fight, more than enough to stamp Portruno flat, and do the same to Tsuno tomorrow. Enough to rampage through every village there ever was if they chose. They stomped and reared and bracked, and for a moment I just wanted to run straight away. There was another word the ancestors had that we didn’t use anymore, and it was army. So many huge, ridgy bodies; so many murderous club feet and thumb-stalked eyes turning our way. So many inhuman thoughts, because Erma had shown us that these were thinking animals, at least a little.

  In amongst them were other beasts, things smaller than people but puffed out with long coats of hair, skittering underfoot in packs of eight or ten. I couldn’t see much of them beyond the hair, but these must have been the beasts the brackers herded, that gave the fleece Tsuno’s hunters made into shirts. I thought the soft, grublike things some brackers cradled with their middle legs were livestock, too, at first, but then guessed the oddly shapeless things were likely young.

  And there were houses, too. I didn’t mark them as such at first, but then I saw a bracker actually making one. It was nothing more than branches ripped off one tree and then woven round the trunk of another to make a conical roof to shelter under, but that was a bracker house. They made them by rearing up, forefeet against the trunk while those middle arms and their mouth-hand did the weaving.

  “Not enough houses,” Melory said. She was right, of course. I saw maybe a score of those roofs, nowhere near enough for all the brackers. It made me think I was right that there were just too many of them, and they’d spread out to another home, only it was somewhere that was already home to people. But then she added, “They’re injured, some of them.”

  It wasn’t the doctor ghost telling her, but just her being a doctor, inside her head. And she was right, a lot of the brackers looked to have been in a fight. Some of them hobbled about on three good legs, some had dark dents on their backs, or missing eyes. I thought for a moment that the people of Portruno had put up a good fight, but I wasn’t seeing spear or knife wounds. Something big and strong had laid into these brackers.

  “They fight each other? One village against another?” Because maybe there’d been a bracker war, and these were the losers, driven out of their home.

  “Never,” Erma told me, but then the beasts had been doing lots of things they never did, so I reckoned she wasn’t the authority she used to be.

  The one sure thing was that we had their attention. More and more of them stopped what they were doing and came to stare. Erma played her silent whistle, which I knew must be loud to the brackers, but they were mostly interested in us outcasts, and in Amorket. They came crowding in from all sides, the jagged edges of their big bodies rasping together, lifting their little heads so their two lower eyes could squint at us. Amorket’s Furies buzzed angrily, and they shied away a little, so I wondered if the wasps made noises I couldn’t hear, too, that the brackers didn’t like.

  Rubbery fingers tweaked my elbow and I flinched back, finding one of them right next to me. It didn’t seem to like what it had touched, though, mouth-hand twisting as though to rid itself of a sour taste. Brack! it said, loud enough to deafen me. The call was taken up and repeated across the crowd of them.

  “Erma, what do they want?” Melory asked. I heard a little tremble in her voice and knew she was as leery of the mass of animals as I was. Except they hadn’t attacked us, no matter what had gone on at Portruno or with the old Lawgiver here.

  A bigger bracker was coming through, carrying something beneath its body. Carrying a body beneath its body. A person. I thought it was a corpse at first, but when the bracker laid it down, I heard a whimper from it.

  “What have they done to him?” Kalloi murmured, because the man was all over bruises and blood, skin a hundred shades of black and yellow, red and blue. Cuts and grazes and rashes and welts, and yet I thought of any of those brackers attacking someone, and it seemed to me they wouldn’t make all those little marks in a fight, they’d smash whole limbs and skulls.

  “One of yours,” Erma spat. For a moment I couldn’t work out what she meant, because of course we can’t tell. Cut off from the world the ancestors built for their children, we lack the sense of what belongs and what does not. But villagers always know, and so do animals and the rest of the world.

  “Nobody I k
now,” Kalloi said, and I was the same. And the more I looked, the less I knew him, because I reckoned I’d recognise this man if I’d ever seen him before. He was very small, and the little of his skin that was unmarked was dead white. He had no hair, and while I’ve known people who were bald, this man had not a single hair anywhere on his body. He trembled and moaned, sounds that weren’t quite words, and his nail-less hands twitched, arms and legs pulled into his body. Everything about him looked weirdly soft and unformed. And, in all this scrutiny, I missed the most obvious thing.

  “No Severance,” Melory said.

  She was right, of course; bruised and ravaged as he was, still that skin was free of one particular stain. The red mixture that marked every one of the Order, and every outcast there ever was, was absent from the man.

  “You’re sure he’s . . . ?”

  “Oh, yes. Definitely, yes.” She had to force herself to look at him, the same human-but-not repulsion as when any villager looked on any of us, the barrier that all the mummery of the Bandage-Men was there to breach.

  Then one of the brackers pushed in, looming over the twitching wretch, and its attention was on me. It had something in its hands, proffering it to me. A flat stone with a hole bored in it, I thought, detached from one of its loops of string. A ridgy stone, or maybe something animal, a piece of carapace or horn, because it had that structure to it, built of layers laid down over and over. I took it from the bracker, feeling its dense weight. The edges were jagged, where it had been broken from something larger.

  Brack! And everyone was waiting for me to do something, people and brackers, but I didn’t know what it was. A rock; a piece of shell.

  The bracker stamped a heavy foot right next to the unmarked outcast. He barely reacted. His whimperings and tremblings all arose out of something within him. His eyes saw nothing.

  Brack! and it lurched forwards so it could put a mouth-finger on the thing it had given me. Two other fingers reached past and touched my face. I froze. Its touch was slightly sticky. I remembered being told they ate no flesh and hoped that was true.